I am running VMware Workstation 7.1.2, but this behaviour was the same in 7.1.1 and 7.x in general (upgrading to 7.1.2 didn't help).
My hardware is an Intel Q6600 running at 3.2GHz per core (stable overclock), with 8GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia GeForce 8600GT graphics card (512MB) powering two 30" Dell monitors at 2560x1600 over DVI, and a bunch of SATA drives in RAID 0.
My host OS is Windows 7 Professional x64, with all updates applied and all drivers up to date also.
For the guests I am also using Windows 7 Professional x64, with VMware Tools installed, and all updates applied.
I have three Windows 7 x64 guests, each of which exists to serve a different purpose. I am a software developer and due to the nature of what I am working on it is important to encapsulate things into three VMs.
My working process involves me working in one of the VMs and then changing to one of the other VMs or to the host. I have a lot of windows open and a dual-monitor setup with lots of screen real-estate is important to me.
I basically want to be able to move fluidly between the VMs whilst maintaining the dual-monitor setup in each VM, so that my windows stay where I put them.
The first thing I tried was modifying the VMware Workstation display preferences:
Autofit window: Off
Autofit guest: Off
Full screen: Center guest
This worked, to an extent. The VM retained its display resolution, and I was able to drop in and out of it to and from the host without issue. This is, in fact, exactly the behaviour I want - but it doesn't work over multiple monitors.
When attempting to use multiple monitors, Workstation told me that fullscreen settings had to be set to autofit guest. So, I tried that:
Autofit window: Off
Autofit guest: Off
Full screen: Autofit guest
This allowed me to use multiple monitors. I went to fullscreen, got it using my second monitor, and put a window on the second display. I then suspended the machine. When I powered it up again, inside the Workstation window was the full, dual-screen guest, which I could scroll around. Success! Errr... no, not quite. When attempting to go back to fullscreen, it for some reason changed to use only one monitor. Grrrr! Of course, my window moved then.
So next I tried changing the guest VM display settings to explicitly set two monitors rather than auto-detecting. Again I tried with Workstation preferences set to both yes and no for fullscreen autofit. I experienced exactly the same behaviour as previously.
I can understand that with fullscreen set to autofit, the guest resolution might change. Fair enough. However, there should be a way to explicitly set up a guest to have two displays of X by Y pixels, and then maximise that guest over your physical screens.
I would expect that if I told Workstation to center in fullscreen that the resolution would not change - and it does not - but I would also expect it to respoect my dual displays, which it does not.
I would also expect that if I have explicitly set my VM to have two displays, then this should not get changed by Workstation. Instead, even if I set two displays the guest only detects one until I press the multi-monitor button.
How, then, am I supposed to set up a guest with three displays? Or, how is someone else supposed to test a dual-display setup with only one display?
Seeing as Workstation allows a guest to have up to 10 monitors - which is extremely unlikely in hardware - there must surely be a way to use those whilst running fullscreen across real physical displays.
Ideally, it would be possible to define, in Workstation, which virtual displays are mapped to which physical ones.
So... is this a bug in Workstation? Or am I using it wrongly? Perhaps there is a combination that i have not tried yet? Or, maybe there is a secret setting that I can put into my VMX file?
Any insight will be mich appreciated.
Before posting my question I had spent many, many hours over several days/weeks searching for answers (posting a question is a last resort for me!). However, since posting the above I did find one interesting thing which, although it did not fix the problem for me, might help people who are attempting to use multiple virtual monitors from a single physical monitor.
Open a command prompt in the guest, and go to C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\
Execute "VMwareResolutionSet.exe 0 n , 0 0 x1 y1 , x1 0 x2 y2", where n is the number of displays, (x1, y1) is the resolution of the first monitor, and (x2, y2) is the resolution of the second monitor.
In my case I ran "VMwareResolutionSet.exe 0 2 , 0 0 2560 1600 , 2560 0 2560 1600". This gave me two monitors in the guest, of the right size - lovely! BUT when making it full screen, it was only full screen on one monitor (so there were scrollbars). Ouch.
Trying to make it go to multiple monitors did not work - Workstation insists that you set the guest to autofit in full screen to use multiple monitors, and that overrides any resolution changes you may using the command above. Telling workstation to centre when using multiple monitors preserves the guest resolution but won't allow use of more than one display on the host. Grrrrr!
It would appear that I need to find some way to force VMware Workstation to use both of my host monitors regardless of the guest setup, and without setting the guest to autofit. I'm not sure that's possible, but it surely must be easy to implement!
I'm continuing to poke at this - hopefully someone will have some ideas or insight.
Unfortunately right now, there is no way to resume a VM directly into multi-monitor mode. You could change the host monitor setup (such as removing a monitor) in between suspending and resuming the VM, so upon resume, we fall back to the setup we know will always work: one monitor. Saving the current mode (full screen, multi-monitor, unity, etc.) is something that we're considering for the future.
I have what appears to be a similar problem.
I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1 (all current updates) and VMware Workstation 7.1.4 on a HP xw6600 workstation (quad-core Xeon E5410 2.33 GHz, 10 GB ECC RAM, ATI X1600 video card connected to two HP LP2065 monitors at 1600x1200). I have a Windows 7 Pro (x86) SP1 guest with the latest VMware Tools.
When I have Autofit Guest enabled, I can resize the guest window and the guest resizes properly. When I Ctrl-Alt-Enter, the mode is switched to Full Screen, but the guest screen size does NOT change. I can manually change the screen size of the guest to 1600x1200 successfully. If I am in window mode and choose Quick Switch (with no other VMs running), the guest DOES automatically switch to 1600x1200.
If the guest is running in a window and I Ctrl-Alt-Enter, then click on the "Cycle mutiple monitors" icon, I get a dialog box titled "Cannot Use Multiple Monitors" which says
This virtual machine cannot use mutiple monitors for the following reasons:
- Full screen display mode must be "Autofit Guest."
...which IS the current setting. This used to work! And I uninstalled VMware Tools from the guest, then uninstalled VMware Workstation 7.1.4 and tried 7.0.1 and even went back to 6.5.4, and I still can't get "Cycle multiple monitors" to work.
Have you made any progress?
Kevin
my problem is a little more annoying.
I have 4 monitors on my host running winows 7 ultimate.
i used to be able to cycle through all 4 monitors so that i caould use all 4. but a recent update has made it so that when i cycle to the 4th monitor it goes back to the first monitor with scroll bars.
so the screen resolition of the guest is right but the vmware window is only on one screen.
if i merge 2 of the screens into on using nvidia mosiac then i can cycle through my 2 logical monitors and get all screens covered but there are toher annoying side effects to this config.
this used to work vmware folks.
rjf
Does that problem only happen with 4 monitors? Or can you reproduce it with fewer? I only have room for 3 monitors on my desk; I don't think I've tested with 4 in quite a while.
This fixed it for me:
specifically "Run the System Configuration Utility, msconfig.exe, on the Windows 7 virtual machine and ensure that the No GUI boot and Base Video options are not selected."
